Newser Headline: “We Need to Sell Young People on War”

I am no fan of millennials. But I don’t wish death on them. I don’t wish them to be gullible fools who will go die or kill people (or be maimed or maim people) because some sociopath ruling elite has decided that we must “project power” in outer Strangelandistan.

As a conservative who loves America and wants to see the country rebound rather than continue to decline, I have encouraged my sons to never consider going to war overseas. We are not supposed to rule the planet or settle other people’s fights. We are supposed to take care of ourselves and pursue peace as much as possible.

The original editorial is behind a pay wall, so all I have to go by is Newser.com’s summary:

Americans in their 50s and 60s largely understand the positive power of the US military. They saw a military buildup end the Cold War, and witnessed successful interventions in Serbia and Iraq in the 90s, Harvard professor Stephen Peter Rosen—a member of that generation—writes in the Wall Street Journal. But younger Americans see the world very differently. They see the Cold War as unnecessary, and came of age during the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires. They aren’t blind to the world’s evils, “they just cannot believe that the use of US military power will make things better.”

Our intervention in Serbia was “successful”? That’s not how I remember that Clinton-led NATO bloodshed at all. And our protection of the Kuwait Kleptocracy was successful, but hardly worth it. The reason Hussein was any kind of threat was only because we had raised him up as our regional strongman to attack and weaken Iran.

In neither case did “the use of US military power… make things better.” Serbia is still full of problems and Iraq was continually hurt and harassed until Bush convinced the nation to return and go to war again. How can millennials see the end result of Iraq and think that the beginning of it in the nineties proves anything good about foreign interventions?

“The task isn’t to convince them that they must support military action when they believe in their hearts that it cannot work,” Rosen writes. It’s to demonstrate that some things are worth fighting for. Fighting nuclear proliferation makes the world and the US safer. Standing up against territorial incursions like Russia’s Crimea move fosters a more profitable free world—and protects against similar attacks on us. “In short, America must help others defend themselves against tyranny because it is in our national interest to do so.”

The safety and security of the United States of America from acts of aggression (whether foreign or domestic!) is worth fighting for. Some idiot dream of global disarmament is a stupid fantasy and is not worth a drop of soldiers’ blood. The only reason our leaders come up with these scenarios is precisely because they think soldiers are plentiful and cheap resources for them to use at will as they attempt to practice social engineering across the planet.

And what does he mean, “Standing up against territorial incursions like Russia’s Crimea move fosters a more profitable free world”? Going to war with a nuclear power will foster a radioactive hellhole where there was once human civilization. Putting the American military in Crimea to “take it back” would be an insane and suicidal decision.

His claim that our military intervention overseas “protects against similar attacks on us” is beyond rational analysis. We are not in any such danger and he knows it. If we ever did get attacked it would be because our military is engaged in several foreign battlefields so that we became weak in defending our actual country.

The only good thing about this editorial is that it proves that Liberals are worried that Rand Paul has too much appeal to the youth of this country.